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Monthly Archives: February 2017

I am pleased to be starting to add some animated gifs to my store. I am creating these animated gifs specifically for teachers looking to add some additional interest to resources they sell through Teachers Pay Teachers and other venues. These gifs will be in a variety of themes. I will also be delighted to receive special requests and custom orders.

Animated GIFs are great for bringing resources alive. Students love them and as well as bringing a smile to their faces, GIFs can also be used to demonstrate or illustrate key concepts.

What Is An Animated Gif to Use In Teachers Pay Teachers Resources?

So what is an animated GIF and how can it be used in your Teachers Pay Teachers resources? I am sure you will have seen animated gifs, even if you haven’t realised it. The chances are, if you have seen a short couple-of-second clip of a kitten doing something funny or someone similar, that this is an animated GIF. It is simply a format to provide animated clips which are quick to load and play and are not as resource heavy as full-blown movie files. The animated GIFs that I am creating will each have a transparent background and can be added to your digital resources. The transparent background means that it can layer over other graphics if required.

How To Use An Animated Gif

Animated GIFs are no more difficult to use than an image. It’s simply a case of importing the GIF into your resource. In PowerPoint and Keynote you will import the GIF as an image. You can resize it, move it around, flip it etc exactly how you would a PNG or JPG image. Of course, the animation will only play in digital resources – if the PowerPoint is printed, the animation will not show 🙁

How Do You Make Animated GIFs?

Did you ever make flip book animations when you were a youngster? Books where you draw an image on each page of a book and on each page, you change the position slightly and when you flick through the book it gives the impression that the drawing is moving. This is how the original Disney cartoons were animated.

This is basically how I create my GIFs. I prepare a number of images, which each change slightly, but when they are shown in a sequence, the character is moving. Because I am using less frames per second than I would if I was doing a true animation, the effect is less smooth and can be a little jumpy. But this is what makes GIFs much loved. Rather than using several images per second, which would create huge files, I use less and this means that I can create GIF files which won’t bloat your resources when you sell them on Teachers pay Teachers – and importantly, it will load quickly for the teacher who has purchased and is using your resources.

If you are feeling creative you can create your own animations. Even if you are not up for animating your own characters, you can quickly and easily create animated banners for your store, previews of your products and more! We’ll be looking at this in more detail soon 🙂

If you have any questions about using animated GIFs just shoot me an email or contact me through the contact form!